2015: Large-scale data breaches – which have increased in size and frequency exponentially over the last decade – show no signs of abating. The US Government starts the year by announcing that details of four million of its employees have been stolen from its Office of Personnel Management.

2016: Huge increase in data volume emerged as represented by the surge in Data Cloud Services such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Azure, among other providers.

2017: Urban Science outperforms the automotive industry’s biggest data companies with the fastest, most accurate sales and suppression data in existence. With 99.7% coverage of the U.S. auto industry sales data, dealerships now have the power to immediately optimize the performance of all marketing campaigns while outperforming their competitors with the use of unprecedented, near-real time data science.

1996: General Motors became the first automaker to introduce the idea of a “connected car” with OnStar included in select Cadillac models.

1999: The term “big data” as we define it today first was first published on paper in the Communications of the ACM. The authors emphasized, “The focus of using big data should be on finding hidden insights and not so much on how much of it exists.”

2010: Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, tells a conference that as much data is now being created every two days, as was created from the beginning of human civilization to the year 2003.

2013: Big data leads the charge as “the most important new technology to understand and make use of in order to remain relevant in today’s rapidly changing market.” - IDG Communications, Inc.

2014: Audi becomes the first automaker to offer 4G LTE Wi-Fi Hotspots access. Mobile usage surpasses desktop for the first time. 88% of business executives surveyed by GE say big data is a top priority for their business.

2016: newly released findings from the Breach Level Index (BLI), there were 974 publicly disclosed data breaches in the first half of 2016, which led to the successful theft or loss of 554 million data records.